These 12 new colleges and institutes will entail an expenditure of Rs 1,150 crore, said health secretary R S Shukla.

To meet the acute shortage of doctors in the state, the government has also come up with yet another plan. It has decided to raise the retirement age of teaching doctors to 70 years from the existing 65. All other government doctors would now retire at 68, up from the present 65 years.

The number of aspirants for medical courses far outnumber the number of MBBS seats in the state. In 2016 more than 45 students chased every seat in Bengal.
(HT Photo)

And here’s another bonus: private practitioners would be invited to serve in government hospitals on some days of the week for a handsome fee.

The Bengal health department is short of at least 4,000 doctors and around 6,000 nurses.

“The five new medical colleges will come up at Cooch Behar, Raigunj, Rampurhat, Purulia and Diamond Harbour. The nursing institutes would be located at Ghatal, Barasat, Basirhat, Jangipur, Jhargram, Uluberia and Kamarhati,” the health secretary told the media at the state secretariat.